Arrests Are Down, and Crime Is Up

First Oakland police stopped solving violent crimes. Then the city's crime rate spiraled out of control.

Oakland police once had a strong record of solving violent crimes, but not under Chief Tucker.

This article won third place in the in-depth, investigative reporting category at the East Bay Press Club's Excellence in Print Journalism Contest in 2009.

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Clearance rates are not only good indicators of how well a police
agency investigates and solves crimes but they're also strong
predictors of future spikes or dips in crime. "Investigative work, the
search for and arrest of perpetrators of past crimes, is also one of
the most effective ways to prevent future crimes," Patrick Harnett, a
former high-ranking official in the New York City Police Department,
wrote in a study about the Oakland Police Department in late 2006.
Harnett, who was commissioned by former Mayor Jerry Brown, believes
that putting criminals behind bars stops them from committing more
crimes and leads to a lower crime rate, while the failure to catch them
leads to a higher crime rate.

In Oakland, the numbers support Harnett's assertion. During the past
decade, whenever the city's clearance rate has declined, homicides have
gone up the following year, and vice versa. In fact, during the past
decade, every time the department's clearance rate decreased by at
least 5 percent from the previous year, the number of homicides
increased the following year. And every time the clearance rate
improved by at least 5 percent from the previous year, the number of
killings dropped the following year. This phenomenon occurred seven
times in the past eleven years.

After Oakland's ability to solve crime started to worsen, the number
of killings in the city jumped sharply. From 2005 through 2007, Oakland
averaged 119 homicides a year compared to an average of 87 from 1997
through 2004. Last year, the city had 119 homicides and is on track to
exceed that number this year.

Oakland's clearance rate also has declined for all violent crimes
over the past decade, and is lower than other large California cities.
From 2005 through 2007, it was just 24 percent, while San Francisco's
was 27 percent; Sacramento, 39 percent; Long Beach, 48 percent; and
Fresno, 49 percent. Violent crimes include homicides, rapes, robberies,
and aggravated assaults. The number of violent crimes in Oakland also
has jumped dramatically in the past two years, and now is nearly as
high it was in the mid-1990s. Of the other four cities, only Sacramento
experienced a similar recent increase.

So what's going on in Oakland? In an interview last week, Oakland's
Assistant Police Chief Howard Jordan rejected a linkage between the
department's declining clearance rates and skyrocketing crime, and
instead blamed several other factors. Jordan oversees the department's
entire investigations bureau. Increased crime, he said, has been caused
by myriad societal problems, from the downturn in the economy, to the
city's poor school system, and the high number of ex-felons living in
Oakland. "We have a high concentration of parolees and people on
probation in the city," he noted.

As for the declining clearance cases, he blamed the no-snitching
culture of today's youth. "We have a very, very difficult time
convincing people to talk to police," he said. "It makes it very
difficult for us to solve cases." Jordan also criticized the FBI's
definition of clearances, saying that internally, the department also
considers a case cleared when it has identified a prime suspect, but
doesn't have enough evidence for an arrest and conviction. However,
those types of "clearances" are not allowed under FBI rules.

But Jordan's explanations don't hold up under scrutiny. Refusing to
snitch is not a problem unique to Oakland. Plus, other police agencies
also are prohibited from calling a no-arrest case "cleared" and their
clearance rates are better than Oakland's. Moreover, Jordan's
contention that cases in which investigators haven't gathered enough
evidence for an arrest should then still be counted as solved just
enshrines failure as success. His reasoning also doesn't explain why
Oakland's clearance rates are so much lower than they used to be. After
all, the definition of a clearance is the same as it was a decade ago
when the department used to do a good job solving crimes. The same is
true of Jordan's explanations for today's high crime rate. Oakland has
been home to lots of ex-cons for decades, and its public school system
has long been among the worst in the state. And finally, crime spiked
in Oakland well before the housing bubble burst and the current
recession began.

According to Harnett, the expert hired by Jerry Brown,
Oakland's investigative unit is incapable of solving most crimes
because it's woefully understaffed and overwhelmed, leaving it no time
to clear difficult cases. "The lieutenants who manage the department's
investigative units are forced to triage cases, assigning for
investigation only those cases that present a very strong probability
of being solved," he explained in his 2006 report.

So how understaffed is Oakland? Plenty. It has, for example, the
same number of homicide investigators as Sacramento — ten. That
may seem reasonable considering the two cities are similar in size and
have a similar number of total sworn personnel. But Oakland is a much
more dangerous city. Sacramento has averaged just 51 homicides per year
from 2005 through 2007 compared to Oakland's 119. In other words, the
workload of each Oakland homicide investigator is more than double of
those in Sacramento. "It would be extremely difficult under those
circumstances to expect a high clearance rate," said one California law
enforcement officer, who asked not to be named because he didn't want
to criticize the Oakland Police Department publicly. "With that
staffing and number of homicides, I don't know how the detectives would
find time to sleep." Not surprisingly, Sacramento solved 21 more
homicide cases than Oakland from 2005 through 2007.

In an interview last week, Chief Tucker acknowledged that his
investigative team is overworked. That would have changed if voters had
approved the parcel tax last month. "We're really skinny over there,"
he said. "If Measure NN had passed, we would have really beefed up the
investigative unit." Jordan said that under optimal conditions
Oakland's homicide team would have twenty investigators.

Now that the entire department has more than 800 officers, up from
about 730 at the beginning of 2008, Jordan said it plans to add four
investigators to the investigative unit in the coming weeks, bringing
the total to 37. In addition to the ten investigators in homicide,
there are currently just seven detectives investigating more than 3,600
aggravated assaults a year; only nine detectives investigating about
3,500 robberies annually; and just seven detectives handling more than
16,000 felony property crimes each year, including burglary, grand
theft, and auto theft. Jordan said he has not decided where to assign
the new officers, but he ruled out homicide because that unit only
accepts veteran cops with years of investigative experience.